Bill Gates

Open full sized image

By 2011, Bill Gates had left his full-time role at Microsoft to focus primarily on philanthropy.

Sean Gallup/Getty Images

Bill Gates (born October 28, 1955, Seattle, Washington) is an American computer programmer and entrepreneur who cofounded Microsoft Corporation, the world’s largest personal-computer software company.

Gates wrote his first software program at age 13. In high school he helped form a group of programmers who computerized their school’s payroll system and founded Traf-O-Data, a company that sold traffic-counting systems to local governments.

In 1975 Gates, then a sophomore at Harvard University, joined his hometown friend Paul G. Allen to develop software for the first microcomputers. The duo began by adapting BASIC, a popular programming language used on large computers, for use on microcomputers. With the success of this project, Gates left Harvard during his junior year and, with Allen, formed Microsoft.

Gates’s sway over the infant microcomputer industry greatly increased when Microsoft licensed an operating system called MS-DOS to International Business Machines Corporation—then the world’s biggest computer supplier and industry pacesetter—for use on its first microcomputer, the IBM PC (personal computer). After the machine’s release in 1981, IBM quickly set the technical standard for the PC industry, and MS-DOS likewise pushed out competing operating systems.

Although Microsoft’s independence strained relations with IBM, Gates deftly manipulated the larger company so that it became permanently dependent on him for crucial software. Makers of IBM-compatible PCs, or clones, also turned to Microsoft for their basic software. By the start of the 1990s he had become the PC industry’s ultimate kingmaker.

Largely on the strength of Microsoft’s success, Gates amassed a huge paper fortune as the company’s largest individual shareholder. He became a paper billionaire in 1986, and within a decade his net worth had reached into the tens of billions of dollars—making him by some estimates the world’s richest private individual.

With few interests beyond software and the potential of information technology, Gates at first preferred to stay out of the public eye, handling civic and philanthropic affairs indirectly through one of his foundations. Nevertheless, as Microsoft’s power and reputation grew, and especially as it attracted the attention of the U.S. Justice Department’s antitrust division, Gates, with some reluctance, became a more public figure.

Rivals (particularly in competing companies in Silicon Valley) portrayed him as driven, duplicitous, and determined to profit from virtually every electronic transaction in the world. His supporters, on the other hand, celebrated his uncanny business acumen, his flexibility, and his boundless appetite for finding new ways to make computers and electronics more useful through software.

All of these qualities were evident in Gates’s nimble response to the sudden public interest in the Internet. Beginning in 1995 and 1996, Gates feverishly refocused Microsoft on the development of consumer and enterprise software solutions for the Internet, developed the Windows CE operating system platform for networking noncomputer devices such as home televisions and personal digital assistants, created the Microsoft Network to compete with America Online (AOL) and other Internet providers, and, through Gates’s company Corbis, acquired the huge Bettmann photo archives and other collections for use in electronic distribution.

Open full sized image

Microsoft Corporation chairman Bill Gates introducing the Windows XP operating system at a news conference in 2001.

© JEFF CHRISTENSEN —AFP/Getty Images

Open full sized image

Bill and Melinda Gates, 2009.

© 2009 Kjetil Ree

In addition to his work at Microsoft, Gates was also known for his charitable work. With his then wife, Melinda, he launched the William H. Gates Foundation (renamed the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in 1999) in 1994 to fund global health programs as well as projects in the Pacific Northwest.

During the latter part of the 1990s, the couple also funded North American libraries through the Gates Library Foundation (renamed Gates Learning Foundation in 1999) and raised money for minority study grants through the Gates Millennium Scholars program.

In 2006, Warren Buffett announced an ongoing gift to the foundation. As of 2025, about 41% of the foundation’s funds have come from Buffett, with the remainder drawn from Gates’s Microsoft fortune. Together, these donations helped the foundation emerge as a uniquely powerful force in global health and education—what Gates has called his “second and final career.”

In 2010, Gates and Buffett launched the Giving Pledge, a public campaign encouraging billionaires to commit the majority of their wealth to charitable causes. Gates and Melinda French Gates were among the first to sign.

Gates expanded on that promise in May 2025, announcing that he would donate 99% of his remaining fortune—then valued at about $107 billion—to the Gates Foundation. The commitment allows the organization to spend $200 billion over the next two decades, after which it plans to wind down operations by 2045, significantly earlier than first envisioned.

With a planned $9 billion annual budget over the next 20 years, Gates said the foundation plans to concentrate on a smaller set of high-impact goals—such as eradicating polio, reducing childhood malnutrition, and controlling diseases like malaria—before winding down.

At the beginning of the 21st century, the foundation continued to focus on global health and global development, as well as community and education causes in the United States. After a short transition period, Gates relinquished day-to-day oversight of Microsoft in June 2008—although he remained chairman of the board—to devote more time to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

In February 2014, he stepped down as chairman but continued to serve as a board member until 2020. During this time he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom (2016). The documentary series Inside Bill’s Brain: Decoding Bill Gates appeared in 2019. Two years later, the Gateses divorced.

In February 2025, Gates released Source Code: My Beginnings, the first of a projected three-part autobiographical series. The memoir gives an in-depth picture of Gates’s childhood, high school, and college years.

In an interview with CBS News, Gates discussed the book, referencing his somewhat privileged childhood, his challenges with social interaction, and how he viewed the world through a “prism of mathematics” growing up. The book ends in 1979—just before Microsoft would take off and become a global phenomenon.

In June 2026, Gates testified voluntarily before the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform about his association with financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Gates said he first met Epstein in 2011, when he already knew that Epstein had been convicted of a sex-related crime, although he said he did not understand the extent of Epstein’s offenses.

Gates continued meeting with Epstein through 2014, primarily because Epstein claimed that he could help raise billions of dollars from wealthy donors for global health initiatives. Gates testified that the promised donations never materialized and that he ended contact with Epstein in December 2014. Gates said he never visited Epstein’s private island, ranch, or Florida home and never witnessed Epstein engaging in sexual misconduct.

During his testimony, Gates also acknowledged extramarital affairs and said Epstein had learned sensitive information about his personal life. Gates said Epstein later made veiled attempts to use such information to pressure him, but Gates denied that Epstein had successfully blackmailed him or that he had paid Epstein any money.

Gates called his association with Epstein a “grave error in judgment,” saying that his pursuit of funding for global health had overridden his better judgment and put both his own reputation and the Gates Foundation’s work at risk.

In August 2026, Gates published a nearly 6,000-word essay on his personal website outlining his views on the risks and potential benefits of artificial intelligence. He argued that AI could accelerate scientific research and improve health care, education, agriculture, and government services, but warned that the technology was advancing faster than governments and societies were preparing for its effects. Gates described the transition to widespread AI use as potentially one of the most turbulent periods in human history.

Gates was particularly concerned about widespread job losses, arguing that AI differed from earlier technological advances because it could replace human cognition throughout many industries. He also warned that AI could make cyberattacks and biological weapons easier to develop and could eventually produce systems that act against human interests.

To manage those risks, Gates called for new national and international systems of AI oversight, proposed taxes on AI use and robots to help support displaced workers, and suggested reserving some jobs for humans. He said he planned to raise AI and its effects on economic inequality with lawmakers and world leaders and to make the issue an ongoing part of his writing and philanthropic work.

It remains to be seen whether Gates’s extraordinary success will guarantee him a lasting place in the pantheon of great Americans. At the very least, historians seem likely to view him as a business figure as important to computers as John D. Rockefeller was to oil. Gates himself displayed an acute awareness of the perils of prosperity in his 1995 best seller, The Road Ahead, where he observed, “Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can’t lose.”